Florine's Love Flight

Shortly before the Old year turned into the New one I had the chance to spend some quality time with Florine Stettheimer's Love Flight of a Pink Candy Heart at the DIA. Fittingly, this is the painting that made me fall in love with her in the first place.

The woman on the balcony is Florine herself, reminiscing about her various love affairs, both actual and imaginary. It's wistful, fanciful and delightful.I've left the images large so that you can enjoy the many fine details of this work. As far as I can tell, these are the only images of their kind online. Florine and her paintings have (so far) been regretfully overlooked.I have to include an image with part of the frame. It adds a near-divine dimension to this romantic reverie.And finally, one of Cupid:

This is the painting that got me hooked on Florine! I was a student at CCS at the time. Be sure to check out Barbara Bloemink's book on Florine's life and art. It's out of print and very expensive but you can get it from a good library. Absolutely packed with incredible info. I now live in SF and we have a big Gertrude Stein exhibition at our MOMA. Florine's delicate little maquettes and set designs for the opera "4 Saints in 3 Acts" are on display. Such a treat!

A genius of 20th-century art, or of any century. She crafted and honed her own, individual way and achieved a unique vision of the world. Certainly her achievements rival and often surpass all of her contemporaries. Her "Portrait of Myself" (1923) is the greatest self-portait ever painted.

A genius of 20th-century art, or of any century. She crafted and honed her own, individual way and achieved a unique vision of the world. Certainly her achievements rival and often surpass all of her contemporaries. Her "Portrait of Myself" (1923) is the greatest self-portait ever painted.

Hi - I wrote the main biography of Florine Stettheimer in 1995 (Yale Press) and do-curated the Whitney Retrospective of her work, and I am publishing a MAJOR definitive new biography of her work at the end of this year that examines basically all of her paintings in great detail with a lot of new research and a new perspective that I think finally positions her as one of the most important American artists of the first decades of hte 20th Century.

I am also doing a number of YouTube videos examining various of her major paintings at length and have special permission from the Metropolitan Museum to do so for the 4 large Cathedral paintings so if you love her work...look out for them.

To see a recent article I wrote on Stettheimer go to https://hyperallergic.com/329408/florine-stettheimer-feminist-provocateur/